


Autumn Dreaming :: The Return

by Nell65



Series: Autumn Dreams [14]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Universe, Gen, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-21 05:48:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4817405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke has not been keeping track of the time and she has no idea when Bellamy's team is due back today. She swears this is true. </p><p>Afterwards, Clarke wonders if she would have been so happy to see him if she'd really understsood how hard it was going to be.</p><p>(Really, at this point, you have to read the other stories in the series. This one doesn't stand alone. Definitely should have been a chapter fic. Sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Return

Clarke told herself that she was just strolling over to the Gate Canteen to get a little nice, crisp, fresh air and a cup of strong tea. The Quonset hut holding the plateau clinic could get amazingly hot and stuffy, it really could. Space born and bred, Arkers were more than a little obsessed with making things **Air Tight**. Great for fuel efficiency. Less great for air circulation. And the cold December breeze did feel good on her flushed cheeks. She pulled her extra jacket close, happy to feel the sweat on her back beginning to dry.

If it just happened to be about the time Bellamy’s party should be arriving, well. Okay. That was just an accident. A coincidence. Nothing more.

“Hey,” Raven said, her voice so close to Clarke’s ear she actually jumped.

“Hey,” Clarke said, trying to recover her poise. “Don’t see you outside much.”

“I wouldn’t miss this, chica. Not for a million years.”

“Miss what?”

“The grand return, of course. Same reason you’re out here.”

“Am not.” And if she told herself that another thirty or forty times as she stamped her feet and blew on her too-hot tea from the Canteen, she just might believe it.

“Hey. Griffin. This is me, you’re talking to. And you were staring so hard at the road that a whole fucking army of reapers could have come up behind you and you wouldn’t have known.”

Clark grimaced in acknowledgement. “Whatever.” She looked at Raven, so bundled up that barely the tip of her nose was visible. That and her laughing eyes. Which had more pain lines around them than they used too. “How’s your leg today?”

“Sucks ass, just like always.” Raven shrugged. “Comon’on. You need back up. I’m here for you. So’s Wick.” Raven pointed with her cane. Clarke leaned around her to see Wick had grabbed a table for them. He waved cheerfully when he saw her looking. She frowned back, but let Raven tow her toward the empty chair.

“I don’t need back up,” she said as she took her seat.

“This is the second time in six months you’ve had to let the other girl have the guy. That has got to suck, so, so much.”

Clarke started to say she had no idea what Raven was on about, but was defeated by the sympathy in Raven’s eyes. “Okay. Yeah. A little. But, this time, I’m the one who ran out. No promises. No secrets. Nothing to regret. Only… a possibility of something. Just a chance. One in a hundred. Maybe. And then…”

“And then that possibility got picked up by somebody else.” Raven wrapped her mittened hand around Clark’s gloved fingers.

“Seems like it,” Clarke shrugged, then lifted her eyes to Raven’s. “I want to get the big, public, first-time meet up thing over with. Quickly as possible. Rip off the bandage.”

“Got a nice crowd for it,” Wick observed.

Looking around, Clarke realized she wasn’t the only one to have decided that this was the moment to take some air. The Canteen was suddenly swamped, people lined up four and five deep at the counter and the tables inexplicably full for a grey, overcast afternoon with a sharp east wind. The front porch on the barn was so full there were people sitting on the railings. There were well over a hundred people milling about, Arkers and clan-members alike. (She’d been trying hard not to the think of them as grounders. They didn’t think of themselves that way, having never had any reason to conceive of themselves in contrast to people who lived in space.)

“Everyone has been worrying,” Clarke said, some of her anxiety easing as she took in all the relieved, anticipatory expressions of the people around her. “Nice to see how much they value him.”

“Bellamy’s our champion.” Raven sing-songed drily, though her eyes were dancing with mischief.

“Just because it sounds absurd, doesn’t make it not true.” 

Clarke winced at her snappish tone, but Raven just smirked at her and Wick laughed.

Whatever Raven might have said next was lost in a sudden swirl of commotion at the point where the road down the mountain met the plateau. A group of eager children had posted themselves there, waiting. Now they were yelling and bobbing in excitement, just too far away for their words to be made out. One of them broke from the group and sprinted for the canteen crowd. As he drew nearer, they could all hear his high, eager cries. “Horses! Horses coming up the road!”

And now Clarke heard them too, even felt the rapid thudding echoing hollowly under her feet: a group of horses cantering fast up the hard-packed, frozen dirt and gravel of the entrance road. 

The first horse appeared, blowing hard from the climb, puffs of steam rising from his flared nostrils. Then two more, a cluster of five or six, and then another four riders strung out slightly behind, holding up the rear. 

The lead horse pulled into a tight circle, spinning to the side of the road, the rider moving easily with the prancing, agitated mount, apparently counting noses, making sure that the rest of the party was following. Once the last of the horses was onto the plateau, the first rider urged their horse into loping canter, caught up to the center, then back the front of the group, settling into the lead as the whole party drew nearer to the main gate.

It looked… like an old movie. Some grand, medieval fantasy epic, maybe. For a misty, cloudy moment Clarke even half thought the riders were wearing cloaks, billowing dramatically in the wind.

She blinked and realized they weren’t. Just heavily fur-trimmed coats, and decidedly un-medieval rifles slung on their backs and shotguns hung on their saddles. A couple of them were even wearing salvaged sunglasses against the flat glare of the afternoon. Bellamy was riding near the center now, just in front of the rest. Clarke recognized his size, the shape of his shoulders under his huge fur collar, almost a shawl, his dark hair, and even from a distance, his smarmy, self-satisfied smirk. It was Bellamy. And damn, but did he look fine on a horse.

And was also milking every possible drop of drama from the situation. Charismatic bastard. 

He grinned and waved.

It was like catnip for the crowd. A ragged cheer went up from the throng assembled near the canteen, got stronger after everyone realized they weren’t alone in their excitement, bouncing back from the stable, building to a rolling wall of sound. 

“Bellamy’s home!” She heard the phrase falling like raindrops all around her, tried to tell herself she hadn’t just said it inside her own head, in more or less exactly the same tones of awe and relief.

They were close enough now that Clarke could appreciate that the group were mounted on the most handsome horses she’d seen yet. The horses the Ark had purchased or traded for with the Woods Clan tended to bulky bodies with large, rectangular heads and rounded noses. The kind of horses Bellamy’s group must have ridden out on.

These new mounts were about the same size as all the others she’d seen, but they were from clearly superior stock. Leaner, more obviously muscled bodies. Cleaner, more elegant shapes to their heads and legs. Narrow hocks, small neat hooves. Pert, sharply curved ears set alertly above broad foreheads and wide, intelligent looking eyes. Their slightly concave faces tapering to narrow, flaring muzzles. 

These were Ice Nation horses. Another gain (or debt?) from this venture.

The riders were finally slowing to a walk, and Clarke could shift her focus to the rest of the party. Lincoln and Octavia, looking more than ever like some sculptor had been given the task of capturing idealized human beauty. Octavia had scored an utterly gorgeous fur hat, because naturally she had, which she wore like an Empress’s freaking crown. Monty Green (who’d gone with them to work his magic on the computers and other equipment Murphy had stumbled on), looking more butch than Clarke would have ever dreamed possible. Nathan Miller, serious and soldierly, his father’s son, two other Arkers she didn’t recognize, and a half-dozen clan members who’d accompanied them along the route. Clarke understood that at least three of them were former reapers who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, go home. They’d apparently attached themselves to Lincoln as some sort of honor guard.

And she was there too. Echo, sister-child of Nia, Queen of the Azgeda. The new diplomatic representative of the Ice Nation. Bellamy Blake’s once and current lover. Clarke couldn’t look too closely yet. Her first impression wasn’t much more than dark hair and dark eyes.

Marcus Kane, no slouch himself when it came to orchestrated drama, must have been hovering nearby, because he strode out at just the right moment, a group of uniformed guardsmen arrayed in his wake. They came to a formal halt just in front of the main gate, David Miller at his shoulder, her own mom at his side, wrapped in a massive, luxuirious fur stole they’d found in storage. 

Proud parents welcoming home their sons. Long live the King and Queen under the mountain.

Raven leaned close, “I don’t know whether to applaud or barf.”

Clarke and Wick burst out laughing, drew surprised looks, and tried hard to stifle themselves.

Bellamy rode right up to the welcoming party, stopping just a meter or so back from them. He swung gracefully off his horse, and Clarke took a moment to appreciate that he’d learned to do it so well. On his feet, he stood and saluted Colonel Miller. She was too far away to hear their words clearly, but some sort of formal military dialogue seemed to be going down. 

Then Kane hugged him. 

She exchanged eye rolls and gagging sounds with Raven, even as she appreciated Kane’s very public show of support; ‘genocide’ still whispering in her head.

Bellamy turned and gestured and the rest of his party began to dismount, handing off the reins of their horses to several of the dozens of eager children who’d swarmed them once Bellamy stepped back from Kane.

Bellamy was turning to speak to the other riders, when his gaze fell on Clarke.

For a queer moment, Clarke thought that time stopped, everyone else froze, and the air stood still. 

Then she shook herself out, forced herself up, her feet into motion and a huge smile onto her face. Well. Her smile wasn’t all that forced. She really, really was damn glad to see him.

“Bellamy!” She cried, half striding, half jogging toward him, Raven’s whispered, “Go get’em tiger,” buzzing in her ears.

His grin was uncertain, but real all the same. When she hugged him, he wrapped his arms tightly around her without any hesitation at all. 

They pulled back, and talked right on top of each other, “I-I am-am so-so glad to-o see you!”

Which made them laugh, and then he nodded and said, “You first, princess.”

“I am so glad to see you,” she repeated, a grin so broad she could feel it splitting her face. He was back. He was real. He was solid under her palms. Very solid. More solid even than she remembered. She dropped her hands, suddenly too conscious of the heat of him.

“I’m glad to see you too. We were all worried.” He hadn’t let go, and now he looked down at her with concern, like she might break or vanish or start to cry.

“I know. I…,” she shrugged, still didn’t have the right words.

“It’s okay.” He dropped his hands as he looked around, then back at her. “We’ll talk more later. Now I want to introduce you to Echo.”

She must have been there the whole time. Standing right beside him. Clarke took another deep breath, smiled broadly, stepped in and embraced her. She felt the other woman go rigid with surprise, then, hesitantly, wrap her own hands around Clarke’s shoulders for a quick, awkward hug.

They let go almost immediately. Stepping back, Clarke let her hands slide down Echo’s arms until she could capture her hands. Looking up, way up – and how come no one had warned her how freaking tall Echo was? – Clarke realized that Echo was a stunning woman. Because of course she was. Slim, elegant, her face too commanding for mere prettiness, she radiated self-assurance and grace. Clarke suddenly felt short and round.

Clarke smiled warmly, gently gripped her hands and said, “It is so good to finally meet you. I want to thank you so much for all your help. Without you, we could never have gotten a team to Murphy, or retrieved his intelligence. We are all in your debt.”

Echo nodded gravely. “Thank you.” She sounded surprised. “I, too, have looked forward to meeting you, Clarke of the Sky People. And you ended our ancient enemy. Talk of any debt between us is meaningless measured against the destruction of the Mountain Men.”

Clarke didn’t have a response ready for that comeback, but fortunately her mother stepped into the breach. 

“Echo. Welcome back to Mt. Weather,” Abby said, with one of her more brilliant smiles. “We’ve prepared an apartment for you, suitable for your station as a representative for your people. Let me show you. I’m sure you’re ready to get inside, where it’s warm.”

Echo nodded, then turned her head to catch Bellamy’s eye. He touched her elbow reassuringly. “Go on. I’ll find you later. I have to go debrief with Colonel Miller and Kane now.” He nodded at Clarke as Echo followed Abby, mouthing ‘see you later,’ then he moved toward Kane.

Their little knot broken up, Clarke was turning away, just about to sigh in relief that the worst was over, when she nearly collided with the unmoving form of Octavia Blake. 

Who was staring fiercely at her: arms crossed, hip cocked, hilt of her sword rising menacingly above her shoulder, a portrait in unrelieved hostility. 

After shocking Clarke speechless for long enough to make her point, Octavia cracked a slow grin, then started to giggle. “You should have seen his face. Like he got a last second pardon just as he expecting to be offered a choice between the noose or a firing squad. Terror turning into salvation in the blink of an eye.”

Clarke laughed too; relief flooding through her, making her feel light headed and giddy. “Oh man. I know that look. He looked just like that when Jaha pardoned him all those months ago.”

Octavia pulled her into a hard embrace, whispered, “Thank you,” into her ear, the edges of her hat brushing so softly against Clarke's cheek, then as quickly as she arrived, slid back into the crowd. Monty claimed Clarke next, and by the time she looked around for Octavia again, she had vanished into the mountain.


	2. Debrief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy reports to Kane.

“And that’s it, sir,” said Bellamy, “Something with a lot of electrical power survived the cataclysm, and it still has some. What it wants to do with the power, we don’t know. But it’s running drones on the northern side of the waste, and along Long Island Sound.” He drew his finger across the map spread out on the small conference table. They were gathered in Kane’s offices, filling in the details from their brief nightly reports from the road.

“And to the west?” Kane asked.

“We never saw any, and we were looking.”

“Also,” Kevin Hu, Guard sergeant and electronics specialist who had come with them, spoke up, “Someone, or some thing, built a large solar field on top of the waste, obviously after the cataclysm, but it was abandoned a long time ago. Probably because the parts couldn’t be replaced or replicated. Murphy thinks somewhere around here…” he pointed to a mark on the map.

“So. Threat analysis, Major?”

Bellamy still had to shake himself, whenever Kane used that rank when talking to him. Somewhere, he was sure, Shumway, that fucking bastard, was laughing mockingly.

“Whatever it was, when it unleashed or helped unleash nuclear war – and sir, you’ll have to watch the tape. So creepy the way he calls it ‘her.’ But since then, it’s not clear it ever had the power reach all the way south or west across the waste. None in the Ice Nation have any history or stories that sound like anyone had that kind of tech or electrical power after the upheavals.” 

Kane turned to Alice Hong, his chief information officer. “Is there no hint in the mountain’s files that they knew about it?” 

“None, Sir. At least not in living memory. They weren’t afraid of using tech, obviously, and they were focused entirely on escaping to the surface.”

“And the City of Light?”

"We’ve searched for that too. They were aware of it, but only as a grounder myth. They dismissed it as a classic salvation story. Couldn’t really follow up, anyway, so…” she shrugged.

“Actually,” Bellamy cleared his throat, “most adults in the Ice Nation appear to reject it as a fairy story too. Think the southern clans are – well – childish, or maybe, excessively credulous, for believing in it. A piece of the old world to tease children with, but no more.”

“Interesting.” Kane frowned thoughtfully. Then after a beat, he shook himself and asked, “And, no word or sign of Jaha?”

“None.”

“But, sir,” Lt. Midori Zimmerman, weapons specialist, spoke up, “Murphy is absolutely convinced he’s still alive. That there is something out there, and that what ever it is, Jaha found it.”

“Why?”

“It sounds crazy, especially coming from a cynical, jaded conduit-rat like John Murphy,” she waved her hands apologetically, indicating her own understanding of how bizarrely unshakable Murphy’s certainty had been, “but, he says Jaha is touched. By, well, something. God maybe. Or ‘Her.’ Anyway. He swears Jaha can’t die until he’s accomplished….whatever it is he needs to do.”

“And in the meantime, Mr. Murphy will stay in his,” Kane turned to Monty, “what did you call it? ‘Really Sweet Bachelor Pad?’ and try to make contact with the Desert Clan and the Nomadic Clans, on our behalf as our designated representative north of the waste.”

Monty grinned. “It is sweet. You should see the motorcycles.”

“I think he’s looking for someone sir. Someone he met on the way.” Nathan Miller said, frowning at Monty. Monty just grinned back at him.

Kane blinked in surprise, then his lips curled in wry humor. “John Murphy, cynical, violent, criminally inclined, conduit-rat John Murphy is looking for a girl?”

Bellamy shook his head, feeling the same thing even after more than a month of travel to get home. “Her name is Emori. Nomadic Clan. And yeah.” He grinned at the ironies of it all. “He’s looking for a girl.”

“If we make it through, actually have descendants survive into the new world, what stories they will tell about us all!” Kane said in amazement, an expression of amused wonder on his face. 

After a beat of two of staring off into space and contemplating the strangeness of the world, he shrugged, and turned back to Officer Hong. “We need to dig back into the mountain’s files. Computer storage and anything hard copy that they saved. To the beginning. See if they ever reconstructed what happened. What went wrong. And if they didn’t, do it ourselves.”


	3. Apologies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke finally has a chance to speak to Bellamy alone.

Bellamy leaned back against the counter in the plateau clinic. It was closed for the day, but he’d sent Clarke a brief text and asked her to wait for him there, he’d meet her after he came in from riding patrol. He’d returned nearly five days ago, but he was utterly consumed by Kane and her mom the Chancellor and his duties and Echo and everyone else who wanted a piece of him, which was pretty much literally everyone else as far as Clarke could tell. The tension of not speaking to him privately had begun to eat her alive. He must have been feeling the same to have actually scheduled this.

“I don’t know how to start,” he said.

Clark looked up and met his eyes, telling her nervous heart to shut the fuck up. To Bellamy she said, “I should start. I owe you an apology. I should never have left. Not like that. Never tried to take sole responsibility for something we both did. Never suggested that my pain was somehow more pure, or intense or meaningful than anyone else’s.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” he agreed, solemn and serious. His best ‘disappointed dad’ face. One he hadn’t used on her before. It was just as irritating as she’d thought it must be. 

She barreled on anyway, determined to stick to her script. “I left you to be strong for everyone, to protect them. All by yourself. While I crawled into a hole and licked my wounds. And you were strong. You held our people together. Got them moving again. Started them building, working for the winter. For the future. You have so much to be proud of. And I know how hard it must have been.”

“I am. Proud. Thanks, though. Accolades from the princess are always welcome.” 

Clarke gave him a sharp look. There was that faint hint in his voice, that not-quite-a-sneer, prole-to-rich-kid attitude, which even now got right up her nose. “Really? I’m trying to apologize here.” She took a deep breath and said, slowly, “I’m very sorry I ran out on you. That was a shitty thing to do.” She raised her brow. “Better?”

He smiled at her, in the way that let her know he’d just scored a point. “Yeah. Better.”

She folded her arms defensively and scowled at him. Not that he didn’t have every right to make her feel bad, but she’d really hoped he wouldn’t. “Good.”

He stood up and crossed the room to look at an old-school human anatomy chart she’d found on a trip to the archives and brought out to hang on the wall. “So,” he asked, “Wanna tell me where you went?”

“Like you don’t know?” It sounded sharper and more frustrated than she intended, but she didn’t take it back.

He came over and hoisted himself up to sit on the examining table, sitting across from her. “We knew when you crossed back into mountain territory. The border is very heavily watched, electronically and in person. But that was almost four weeks after you walked away.” He let the worry and concern and anger he must have felt then color his words. Clarke felt (yet another, thanks mom) stab of guilt.

“Oh,” she said. “Those four weeks.” She hadn’t really answered this question, even when Kane asked, claiming her confused emotional state prevented her from really paying attention to her surroundings or remembering it afterward. She’d lied. But she owed Bellamy more than she owed Kane. A lot more. “I went to the drop ship first, scavenged what little I could find. Others had been there before me.”

Bellamy nodded.

“Then I headed for the art supply store.”

“I thought you’d been there. I went looking, after we reclaimed the drop ship two weeks out.”

“After that I wandered west – opposite direction from everything I knew. I didn’t want to run into anyone.” 

“What did you eat? How did you stay safe?”

“I had three good knives on me when we left the mountain. I found string at the art supply store. I cut reeds, bark. Wove it together. Made some snares. It was the end of summer – there were plenty of berries and roots around. I slept in the day, usually. Tended a fire at night…” she trailed off, remembering. Remembering waking up next to a few smoldering embers on a damp grey dawn to the face of a coldly enraged Lieutenant Carl Emerson, former Mountain Soldier, current vampire living on stolen bone marrow, his shaking handgun pointed straight at her head. Watching him fall a heartbeat later, an arrow protruding from his eye. She shivered and pushed it back. “I was mostly trying not to think.”

“How’d that work out for you?” he sounded sympathetic and desperately curious, all at once.

“Terribly. I kept seeing that green ball, rolling across the floor in that fancy dinning room.” 

He nodded, exhaling deeply. “Me too.”

After that he didn’t say anything more. Just sat. His hands hanging loosely in his lap, his feet dangling off the ground. They were quiet for a long time. It was oddly comfortable. 

Eventually she said, “I was pretty hungry most of the time. Pretty spacey as a result. Even looked for those damn nuts.”

“Find any?”

“Oh yeah.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Good trip?”

“Nope. Bad, bad, bad. Which totally didn’t stop me from trying it a second time. And a third. Until I ran out.”

He laughed. 

“You?”

“Get high? Yeah. Turns out they grew prime weed here, and then processed it into hashish. Used it to buy influence in Polis. And they had proper equipment for making liquor. So I got drunk a few times, too.”

Clarke pulled a face. “That’s not what I meant,” she said impatiently.

He gave her another one of his ‘I just scored a point’ looks, but he also answered her question without further dicking around. “Kane put me back in the guard the day you left, gave me a brevet appointment to Major. Next day we returned to the Mountain to clean out the bodies. Make it our own.”

Clarke nodded, but her throat closed up so she didn’t say anything. She knew, from hearing about it from everyone else, what a sad, gruesome, horrible job that had been. She didn’t know how Bellamy’d been able to stand it, because they weren’t all strangers to him. There were people he knew and liked and trusted among the dead. And children. Children he had wanted desperately to save. She wasn’t brave enough to ask him about it. Maybe never would be.

“After that,” he was saying, “I’ve been mostly on patrol. Learning the land, learning to be a better leader, hunter, soldier. Training. Drill. Or working construction, here and Camp Jaha. TonDC.”

“TonDC?”

“I helped with rebuilding their main meeting-house. Seemed the least we could do.”

Clarke nodded again. It was, literally, the least they could do. God, did she regret not figuring out how to handle that situation in her own way. Not let Lexa bulldoze her into doing what she knew – knew – was wrong. “I’m glad you did that. It meant a lot to Indra, that we did that. She actually said as much. In words and everything.”

“She definitely takes stoicism to a new level.”

They fell silent again after that. The one, last thing they weren’t talking about suddenly very heavy and awkward between them. 

He must have felt it too, because he hopped off the examining bed and wandered over to her desk, tossing off, super-casual-like over his shoulder, “Oh, and I started hooking up with this girl from the Ice Nation. One of the ones we rescued from the Mountain Men.” 

“Ah.” She actually smiled in relief.

He looked at her over his shoulder. “Her name is Echo.”

“Mm,” Clarke couldn’t help shaking her head at him, though she was plenty happy to play along. She appreciated the sideways approach he’d found. He was good at that. Her more usual, kick-down-the-door style didn’t always work out so well. She asked, “Like her?”

“Most days,” he stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Which is better than at first, when I only liked her most nights and almost never during the day.” He smirked a bit at that, half bragging, also fully aware that it didn’t paint him in a particularly good light.

She chuckled obligingly, but wondered, in her heart, what the hell he’d managed to get himself into this time. It was an open secret in the Ark gossip mill – which was as intense as ever – that he wasn’t sleeping in his assigned quarters. He was, more or less, living in Echo’s diplomatic suite. 

“She seems like an interesting person,” she offered. 

Which was such a cop-out. Anyone was interesting if you put your mind to it. Though, of course, Echo was interesting, as a subject. She was everything everyone had said. Arrogant, brash, direct well past the point of rudeness, she had no time at all for anyone she didn’t regard as important. But her eyes, her eyes were deep and dark and a whole lot swam far below the surface. Her watching had weight. Clarke could feel it. 

“Yeah. Turns out she is. Prickly as hell until we hit the road. Being outside, away from the mountain, and she relaxed a lot. Especially the closer she got to home. Got easier to be around.”

“What did she think of Murphy?”

“Never met him. She stayed in their capitol.”

“Interesting she got the job to come back to Mt. Weather.”

“She’s a warrior, skilled with horses, and a member of the Queen’s family. And she already knew us, and speaks English better than most of her people.”

“Indra said she was studying us as potential enemies.”

“Why do you think Midori Zimmerman went with us on the road north? She’s got a photographic memory and excellent drafting skills. She’s made a rough map of every settlement we went through, and a really detailed one of their capitol city.”

“Why is there so much distrust among the clans?” Clarke demanded. It was a rhetorical question, and one that she knew didn’t really have an answer.

“My opinion? I think the Mountain Men engineered it. Keep their flocks unbalanced. Too busy squabbling with each other to face their real enemies.”

“That doesn’t make it not real,” Clarke objected. “Not fifty years in.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“But,” Clarke said, “That’s got to complicate things for you. For Echo. The Azgeda, they have got to have their own agenda here and we don’t really know what it is,” she kept her voice light, working hard to follow Bellamy’s lead in this. Friend to friend, talking about relationships. Nothing more. And then the sense of her words hit her. “Are you and Echo actually spying on each other? For your respective people?”

He met her eyes, but his were unreadable to her. “I think, it’s better to say, we use each other to gather the intel that we both hope will keep our peoples working together, toward a better future for all of us.”

“Oh Bellamy,” she breathed. “That has got to be weird as all fuck.”

“Yeah,” he made a face. “It is.”

“Does that change anything? About how you feel about her?” 

He just looked at her. She flushed. That had been a really stupid thing to say. Which somehow led to her blurting out, “I don’t know what would have happened, if I had stayed.”

“Neither do I, princess.”

“I’m sorry, though. I wish,” she rushed on, trying get through the emotional marsh without sinking, “I wish we could have found out.”

He shrugged. “I wish I hadn’t thrown Raven’s radio in the river.”

After a shocked beat, she laughed at her own shock. “You’re kind of an ass, Bellamy Blake.”

He just grinned a twisted grin at her. “Wanna come have dinner with me and my girl?”


	4. Disclosure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things become clearer. And more difficult.

“Echo!” Abby couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. This was not a woman she had ever expected to see again in the Mountain’s clinic, short of some kind of life or death emergency. Her first, and second, experiences had, after all, been pretty terrible – each in their own way. But Echo was seated on the examination table in the consultation room, completely uninjured and not visibly ill. “How can I help you today?”

“I understand you can confirm pregnancy?”

“Yes. We can.” Somehow Abby was completely taken aback, even though like everyone else in Mt. Weather she was fully aware of Echo’s months long affair with Bellamy Blake. A situation she’d never quite been able to reconcile with her belief that Bellamy and her daughter had some kind of … something, going on before… Before. She forced her attention back to her new patient. “Is this for you? Do you think you might be pregnant?”

Echo’s expression suggested she found Abby rather dim. “Yes. I believe that I am pregnant.” 

“How far along?” 

“I’m not sure. I never had a monthly cycle, not since …” she shrugged and didn’t finish her sentence. “I thought it was because of the loss of blood, and my illness after, and that it would return in time.”

“But it hasn’t.”

“No.”

“Were you employing any contraception?”

Echo looked at her blankly.

“Were you doing anything, or using anything to prevent pregnancy?”

“Oh.” She looked down at her lap, then up again, a faint – and entirely unexpected – blush staining her high cheekbones. “No. It seems foolish now, but I thought I didn’t need to worry until after my cycle returned.”

In her head, Abby wondered why the hell Bellamy Blake hadn’t been more proactive about this, even though she knew that wasn’t entirely fair. On the Ark they had used long term, reversible, or permanent for those who wished, contraceptives aimed primarily at female fertility. He wouldn’t necessarily have thought it through at first. That Echo wasn’t from the Ark, and what that could mean. And then later, man-like, decided it was all taken care of.

Abby nodded in understanding. “That’s usually true, but, not always. And given that, lack of a monthly cycle is not necessarily a reason to assume you’re pregnant now. So, other than the obvious,” and she smiled warmly to make it clear she wasn’t trying to be dismissive, “what makes you think you might be pregnant?”

Echo must have felt it anyway. Or been telling herself that for days or weeks. She raised her chin. Good Lord, but this girl was prickly. 

“All the little things,” she said. “I feel swollen. In the late afternoon I feel ill. I just feel… off,” and her mask slipped, and for a brief second Abby saw only a worried young woman, facing the upending of her life as she had known it before, her feet set on a new path.

Abby saw no reason to doubt that Echo could be pregnant, and this was a pretty conventional list of symptoms. “For how long?”

“Since just after we left for the north.”

“Did you check with your own healers, while you were home?”

Her mouth drew into a firm line. “No.”

“No?”

And her chin went up again. Damn, but this girl was wired so tight. 

“I understand you have tests,” Echo said. “You can tell if the fetus is sound. Healthy. Developing as it should.”

And a whole bunch of things began to become clearer. “Yes. We do.”

“And you can perform an abortion if it is not. One that would protect my chance to try again. In the future.”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. Please.” 

Abby was almost positive she had never once heard Echo, sister-daughter to the Queen of the Ice Nation, say please before. 

“The tests?” Abby asked, just to make sure.

“Yes.”

“Are you concerned about anything in particular?”

“One in every four or five babies among women in my family is damaged. Most are too damaged to live. The mothers of the damaged babies, the birth often kills them too. I do not wish to die for a mutant child.”

Looking at that rigid jaw and anguished eyes, Abby’s heart pinched a little, realizing how terrified Echo must have been, given those odds, and how determined once she realized there was another way. Indra and Lexa both had said something to the effect of being surprised that Nia had sent her relatively untried young relative to fill such an important position. They were worried it meant Nia didn’t take an alliance seriously. Now Abby suspected that instead, Echo had worked and schemed and fought to earn the job, all so she could sit here and have this one conversation, one on which her future and even her life could quite possibly depend.

“Have you told the father?”

“Bellamy is the father.” 

There was a challenge there, Abby knew. Faint, but she heard it all the same. She let it go. The last thing they all needed was her meddling with someone else’s star-crossed love affairs. Not even her daughter’s. Which were entirely mysterious anyway.

“Have you told him?” she asked.

“No.” 

“You ought to. Among our people, fathers expect to be involved.” 

“It is not his decision what I do with my womb.”

“No. It is not. That is your choice alone. But you wouldn’t be pregnant without him either. So he should be told.”

“Fine. I will tell him. After I know.”


	5. Reconciliation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke and Lexa meet for the first time. Again.

“Hello” Clarke said.

“Hello,” Lexa replied.

Clark turned away. She couldn’t bear to look at her, remember how much she’d liked her. Admired her. Wanted to learn from her. How to be a strong leader in this benighted world of hers. How to be a girl in charge. Wanted her approval. Wanted. 

Or maybe only how much she’d wanted to like her. To want to want her.

So she studied the main room of the rebuilt meeting place of TonDC instead. The most neutral spot anyone could think of for a formal first meeting for Clark and Lexa. First since the mountain fell, anyway. 

The room, the building, had the fresh construction look she’d gotten used to in front of Mt. Weather on the plateau. In Camp Jaha. It was easy to see that Arkers and Ark equipment had helped with the building. 

It still seemed very strange and out of place in TonDC, a new log building, with squared corners and glassed windows and planked floors and solid wood doors. Though she’d been assured that the design was proposed and approved entirely by Trikru and was not something imposed on them by the Ark.

Lexa was seated in a chair toward the side of the big open room. She was arranged to receive visitors, but she was not seated on her portable, twisted-roots throne, nor was she raised on dais. There was even a table to her side, with a pitcher and some tumblers and leather portfolio case, as though she could turn and write letters or something if the spirit moved her. Possibly it was her version of an accommodation to the new world order.

“I understand you’ve been asking after me?” Clark said, wandering away to examine a fresh hanging on the wall. No reason to pretend she was the one who needed the formal audience. 

“Yes. Once I heard you’d returned to your people.”

Six weeks ago. She’d returned six weeks ago. Seemed Clarke wasn’t the only person who wanted time to collect herself. She walked on to look at the next hanging. They were fabric and found item collages, bits and pieces put together to form abstract patterns, almost mosaic-like in their intricacies. They reminded her a bit of Indra’s battle tunic. She wondered briefly if the patterns carried significance beyond ornamentation. She would ask Lincoln later.

“I needed some time to clear my head. After the fall of the Mountain,” Clarke said. After she murdered three hundred and fifty or so people. All to save her tattered remnant of forty-six. And her mom. And gain a fortress to shelter her people, only she hadn’t realized that was what she was doing at the time, so it didn’t seem like it should count in her defense.

“I am very glad to be seeing you again,” Lexa said.

Maybe it was just Clarke’s imagination, but she thought Lexa raised her voice hopefully on ‘again.’

“Maybe.” Clarke turned just enough to hold Lexa in her field of vision. She looked – and sounded – sincere, but then, Lexa was very, very good at the whole poker face thing. “But you didn’t expect to see us, to see me, again, did you? You believed you’d sentenced me and mine to certain death.”

“Yes.” Lexa raised her chin. “I make no apologies for that.”

Clarke shrugged dismissively and turned to the next hanging. “I wouldn’t accept them anyway. Your decision was stupid. Very stupid. But, you’ve been paying a high price, and will continue to pay it for a long time.”

Lexa’s voice got harder, “I did what was…”

Clarke spun and cut her off, her own voice louder and angrier than Lexa’s. “You made your word and your clan faithless. You broke our alliance. You sold us out to our enemy for your own gain. Your word has no value now. No Clan, no Nation will be able to trust Trikru. Trust that you won’t sell them out when the time comes. Certainly not mine!”

“That’s not…”

Clarke talked right over her, drawing close enough as she spoke that by the end she was staring down at the Commander, taking the rare advantage of a height difference in her favor. “And you cheated your alliance of their opportunity to take what you said was rightfully theirs. Blood had no blood that day. Turns out that isn’t some great, sacred principle for Trikru after all. I killed one of my own to clear what you insisted was your clan’s blood debt. Only it turns out, it was all a lie. Just some sick game. When it mattered, you quit the battle. Turned and ran, just as the tide had turned and final victory was within your reach! Our reach!” 

“I could not have known that!”

Clarke shook her head, suddenly furious all over again. “Yes. You could. You had to! How could you not know? Your ancient enemy had rolled on his back and bared his throat. He actually offered you a deal. The very first such offer in more than fifty years – fifty years! – of struggle. And instead of cutting his throat, you chose to take his offer. To extend his life. Preferring the world you knew to the one that would come with his defeat.” 

Clarke didn’t have to act her disappointment, her contempt. It filled her heart and her mouth.

“It was a good deal.” Lexa set her full lips in a sullen line. “For us. For the twelve clans.”

On anyone less formidable it would have looked a hell of a lot like a pout. 

Torn between a desire to slap her, and storm out the room, Clarke raged on instead.

“He was a lying vampire,” Clarke flung at her. “He would not have honored it. Your people were cattle to him and his. Not respected enemies.” Clarke stepped closer still. Put her hands on the arms of Lexa’s chair. Leaned in to hiss, “Beasts. Herd animals. Prey.” 

This close she could smell the faint scent of cedar and sweet grass, wood smoke and lavender that was Lexa’s alone.

Clarke straightened up and rocked back half a step, curling her lip into her best, dismissive sneer. “You don’t honor a deal with prey. You just bait the trap with it.”

“No!”

“Yes.” Clarke took another step back. “I knew him, Lexa. I dealt with him. I lived in his house. Ate his food. And I killed him. Shot him in the chest. Watched him die. He was a vampire, and he thought your people were less than fully human. He played you for a fool, and you let him.” 

She almost spit the last words, not sure if the venom dripping from her tone was aimed at Lexa, at Wallace, or at herself. Probably all three.

“You think you know our world!”

“No. I don’t. I don’t know shit about your world. Just like you never bothered to find out anything about mine. But it doesn’t matter. The mountain fell. The world changed. We have to deal with what is, in the now. Yesterday is gone.”

“We observed you carefully, learned more than you think!”

“You observed us for less than three weeks before you attacked us. You decided in your pride that because we were children, and new to the woods, we must also be stupid and helpless. We are neither. Three hundred of Tristan and Anya’s warriors died for your mistake. And Tristan. And Anya.”

Lexa glared, but said nothing.

“Then you thought our parents – the people who birthed us, trained us, taught us to survive in conditions you can’t even begin to imagine – would be easy to frighten. Instead our leaders walked empty handed into your villages. Wanting to talk with you, to learn from you, trade with you. Wanting to tell you who we are and why we landed uninvited on your doorstep, running from our own fate with no way to return. Wanting to reach some kind of accord with you. You threw them in pits. And watched them. And tested them. And still never once asked them a question. Not one question!” 

It was something Kane had mentioned more than once. His frustration with the Grounder’s rigid certainty that they already knew everything they needed to know and anything they didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing anyway could occasionally send him into fits of speechless fury. It could take him hours to walk it off in the tunnels and passageways of the mountain fortress. 

“We know we have much to learn. But your pride has cost you more than you had to give," Clarke said.

Lexa looked away first. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, and when she opened them at last she looked down at her empty hands. “All the old truths they taught me – from the time I was less than two years old, when the spirit marked me for leadership – those truths, those rules, they’re useless now.” She raised her face to look at Clarke. “You smashed the world, when you fell from the sky. All of you.”

“I know.” 

Lexa let out a long, shaky exhale, her ‘leader’ mask gone. Now she was wearing her ‘I’m just a girl like you’ look. Lost. Alone. Breaking under responsibilities too large for her. Clarke felt herself wanting to cross the tentative bridge and sit next to her. Take her hand and tell her they would get through this.

Lexa raised her eyes to Clarke. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do next.”

That wasn’t what Clarke had expected. Utter helplessness. 

Clarke started to laugh. And then laugh and laugh and laugh. Her legs gave and she half sat, half collapsed into another chair set along the far side of the room, furthest from Lexa. It was minutes before she could get her hysteria under control.

Finally, she was able to say, “None of us know, Lexa. We’re all making it up as we go.”

It was Lexa’s turn to stand, to come closer. “I would like us to work together.”

“For the sake of both our peoples, I really fucking hope we can.”

Lexa was so close now that she could drop to one knee. She looked up into Clarke’s face, her eyes glowing with intent and meaning. “I would like us, Clarke, you and me, to work together. I have hoped for weeks, since learning of your safe return, that you would feel the same.”

Clarke met Lexa’s gaze head on; let herself feel the tidal pull, the deep tug of mutual admiration and latent desire that was still there. Then she reached inside and ripped it out. 

“Since the last time I turned you down, you left me and mine to die what you expected would be a horrible, painful death? Sure. Fine. I’ll fuck you. Whenever and wherever you want. Now, maybe? Here in this room?” She started to shrug off her jacket.

Lexa reared back, dismayed horror in her eyes. “NO! That’s not…. what I meant. What I wanted.”

“Isn’t it? Because it sure as fuck sounded like that.”

“Clarke. Please! There was something there. Between us. I know it.”

“I don’t. There was only… potential.”

“I hope that there can be potential, again.”

“I have no idea, Lexa. And you have no right to expect anything else from me.”

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I was writing one shots, but they blurred into a story arc.


End file.
